Welcome to this weeks edition of the MUG Mailings, we hope you find this useful!  Please feel free to forward to friends and neighbors you think might be interested.

Topics:

• Moodle Drop-In Clinic Schedule
• The difference between Import and Restore
• Cleaning up after Word - when copy/pasting goes bad
• MUG list subscription

Moodle Drop-In Clinic Schedule

Need a booster to your Moodle knowledge?  Never jumped into Moodle before?  Come one, come all!  We have a schedule of Drop-In Clinics that has something for everyone.  The first 30-45min will be a brief presentation on the basic functions of Moodle, and the rest of the time will be open for individual consultations on specific questions or ideas you may have for your Moodle site.  Most of the Academic Technologists will be there, so you will be sure to find someone who can work with you!  No sign up is required.  Don't forget to bring your syllabus!

Dates, Times and Locations:

The Difference between Import and Restore

It's confusing, but you don't always want to Import a course, sometimes you want to Restore it!  There are a few conditions that help you decide which function you should use when trying move content from one course site to another.  Here's an attempt at making it simple:

Import - use this function when the content you want to copy is on another Moodle site from the current academic year.  Examples would be courses you taught in previous terms, or content from colleagues teaching another section of the same class.

Restore - use this function when the content you want to copy is from a previous year or another institution's Moodle site.  It is necessary to have run the Backup function on the source content course prior to using Restore on your course site.

In either case, you can use these functions to copy just a few items from a particular site.  However, the Restore function is more useful when you want to adjust the assignment due dates based on the course start date, or if you want to completely delete your existing course content to start over with new material.

For specifics on how to perform the Import, Restore and Backup functions, see the Moodle Video Tutorials pages on the Academic Technologies website:

http://apps.carleton.edu/campus/at/acad_documentation/tutorials/?filters[1][type]=category&filters[1][id]=542349

Cleaning up after Word

Don't you hate cleaning up after others?  Well, unfortunately, you really should when you copy from Word and paste into Moodle.  But Moodle makes it easy with it's Clean Word HTML button.

When you create a document in Word, it writes a whole lot of ugly code in the background to do all of that fancy formatting.  Word is kind enough not to show you any of that stuff while you are working, but webpages are not quite smart enough to do that.  The result can vary from slightly annoying formatting to losing sight of your entire course site!

To avoid problems, click the Clean Word HTML button in the Moodle editor toolbar BEFORE SAVING your Moodle page.  You'll notice that some of the Word formatting is altered after you use the button, but it's a whole lot better than loosing your whole Moodle page!  You can use the Moodle editor tools to add back any formatting you want to keep on the page.